Yellow Vanishing Point

The Great Glen Artist Airshow, an art event running over 2 days in the Highlands near Inverness organised by Arts Catalyst in colaboration with HICA. The show involves the artists: Adam Dant,Gair Dunlop,London Fieldworks,Alec Finlay,Susanna Norregaard Nielsen, Esther Polak & Ivar van Bekkum,Camila Sposati,Louise K Wilson and Claudia Zeiske

It was arranged for Camila to stay for a mini-residency in June 2010, to develop her piece, which aimed to pick-out in smoke the layered low crests and summits of hillsides behind HICA. Her use of smoke develops her interest in the processes of entropy, of order and disorder, and the tendency of matter to shift towards equilibrium.31 At HICA, Camila also responded to the often misty conditions locally, finding a colour of smoke that might be sympathetic to the surroundings. After several experiments, a deep yellow smoke was chosen. Her work, Yellow Vanishing Points did indeed, on the day, combine with rather misty conditions; several plumes forming an extended veil of smoke, blending with the slow air-currents and contours of the hill, as an organic, seeping, growing, then slowly dissipating, mass.

Here, the viewer might be prompted to contemplate the nature of matter, and further reflect on the intention, overall, of an ‘Artists’ Airshow’. A work such as this could be seen to present a dualism of matter and spirit, where air may represent something immaterial, in a schema where through decreasing density, solid breaks down into liquid, liquid into gas, gas into some ethereal plasma, which, at some further point, becomes something actually immaterial. This work, I would suggest, presents the opposite, where by extension even the nothingness of space would still be understood as substantial. As Peter Stevens says ‘…space has a real material structure…our common-sense idea that space is a big nothing has been replaced with the more sophisticated thought that space is a big everything.’32 Seeing Camila’s work in this light, the air is shown as material; the piece demonstrates that ethereality is not exclusive of temporality.

Camila has elsewhere grown crystals as part of her practice,33 crystals being a ‘low entropy’ state compared to the ‘high entropy’ of smoke. Her works in both entropic states do appear to aim at revealing a mysterious and invisible animating presence, activating the forms and driving the processes of change.34 But, made explicit by considering the process of entropy, the presence is that of energy, and energy is something that is understood as interconvertible with matter:35 That is, as expressed by Einstein’s iconic formulation, E=MC2, there is no dualism present. Matter and energy are the same, in differing forms.36